Information Flow in Cooperative Control

This project is focused on developing the underlying theory required to achieve integration of information flow into control analysis and design for cooperative tasks of multi-vehicle systems. By making use of tools from control theory, dynamical systems, and graph theory, we are developing a framework for analyzing the effects of information and sensor topology on feedback systems and developing tools for designing information flow and control algorithms that build on this framework. We are applying these ideas to several test problems involving real-time, distributed control of a set of multiple vehicles performing cooperative tasks. In addition to computational exploration through simulation, we plan to implement our algorithms on a multi-vehicle, wireless testbed for networked control, communications, and computing that is being developed at Caltech.